Present day cellular telephones utilize batteries that do not need to be charged on a daily basis. Because of this, a cell phone user often forgets to check the charge level of her cell phone battery for extended periods of time. This leads to the battery losing all of its capacity, leaving the cell phone inoperable. The fact that the battery is dead prevents a user from initiating phone calls as well as receiving incoming phone calls when she is not near a battery charger or an alternative power source.
Existing cell phones have features and functions which attempt to warn users when their batteries are losing capacity. Some display or otherwise indicate xe2x80x9clow batteryxe2x80x9d (i.e., low capacity) warnings and/or a battery""s capacity level. Though these displays exist they are ineffective because they are persistent and, thus, often go unnoticed or are ignored. Such displays are analogous to gas gauges in automobiles which also often go unnoticed even when the gauge reads xe2x80x9cExe2x80x9d for empty.
One option that has been suggested is to provide a more invasive warning, such as a warning tone. However, such a tone is undesirable because cell phone users would be disturbed by any continuous or regular tone. Yet another option is to provide for such a tone, but in combination with a threshold of some sort (e.g., a tone is emitted for 20 seconds). One disadvantage of this approach is that the selected threshold may cause a warning or alert to be output when a cell phone user can do nothing about it.
There is a need, therefore, to provide methods and devices which provide cell phone users with warnings or alerts in a more effective and intelligent manner, such that the warning/alert can be acted upon in a timely fashion.
It is a desire of the present invention to provide methods and systems for reminding cell phone users to charge their cell phone batteries as well as to provide other information to users (collectively, the reminders and other information are referred to as xe2x80x9ccharging informationxe2x80x9d). It is a further desire to provide methods and systems for reminding cell phone users to charge their cell phone batteries which do not require that users remember to check their cell phones for indicators or signals.
The present invention provides methods and systems for indicating charging information to cell phone users when a cell phone is near an associated charger. According to the present invention, a charger and a cell phone are adapted to establish a communication link with each other when the cell phone is within a predetermined range of the charger. More specifically, the charger and cell phone may comprise Bluetooth linking units and the link they establish may comprise a Bluetooth, piconet connection.
Once a communication link has been established, the linking unit within the charger (referred to as a xe2x80x9ccharger linking unitxe2x80x9d) is adapted to transmit an information retrieval command to the linking unit within the cell phone (referred to as a xe2x80x9cphone linking unitxe2x80x9d). The cell phone is thereafter adapted to obtain charging information and to send the charging information to the cell phone. The charging information may comprise information which is associated with a capacity of the cell phone""s battery or and/or battery usage statistics.
Either the charger or the cell phone may comprise an analyzer unit. The analyzer unit is adapted to analyze the charging information and, when appropriate, generate alert commands based on results of the analysis.
The alert commands may be sent to a display device, a sound-emitting device and/or a vibration generating device in order to generate sensory alerts.
The charger may also be adapted to establish a communication link with a PC in order to transmit similar alert commands to the PC.
According to the present invention, a cell phone and charger can be adapted to indicate charging information (e.g., battery capacity) to a user when the cell phone is within a predetermined range of the charger, making it unnecessary for the user to check for the charging information. The methods and systems of the present invention reduce the likelihood that a battery will lose all of its capacity when a power source is unavailable. Other advantages of the present invention will become apparent to those of skill in the art from the drawings, detailed description of the invention and claims that follow.